Weekly Update
Week 6 of the Bootcamp was pretty fun! Abram brought in his GameCube and we played some lunchtime Melee. Todd showed us his favorite game — Monkey Ball — it was pretty fun but I was not very good at it. On Thursday, Anna and I carved a pumpkin! Warning: very spooky pic of said pumpkin below. On Friday, Awesome Inc held their monthly Family Lunch. They brought in Pasta and Salad from Puccini’s and all those who work out of the Awesome Inc space shared a meal! I was already a huge Puccini's pizza fan — now I’m a lover of their lasagna as well!
Some Bootcampers playing GameCube (L-R: Taylor, Abram, Myself, and Will)
Anna carving the eyes
Very spooky!
Family lunch — Puccini's Pasta and Salad!
A Halfway Point
This Friday marked the halfway point of the Bootcamp. It is a little wild that the course has flown by so quickly. At the same time, as we started to refactor some of our earlier projects this week, I realized just how much ground we have covered in such a short period of time. I’m having a lot of fun in the Bootcamp, so it is a little bittersweet to think that the rest of the Bootcamp might fly by as well. I am very excited, however, to graduate and pursue a job in Lexington’s Tech scene!
React Reflection
As I wrote in last week’s blog post, I initially struggled with understanding React. It took me most of week 5 before I even felt like I was gaining any traction. Last weekend, I got a full night's sleep and spent part of Sunday re-reading the React documentation. This week, I worked through the React tutorial for the second time, and read through the documentation a third. Each time through, I would make it further and further before my comprehension level would start to drop. By the end of the week, I was starting to feel well versed in the basics of React — just in time to switch gears and start learning MySQL and PHP. 🙃
Next Week: Back End Development
Next week we will start working with Back End languages. Up until this point, we have been working with Front End languages and frameworks. Front End development is more client side focused and deals with design and user interfaces. Back End development involves working with servers and doing more behind-the-scenes work. Additionally, being able to do both Front End and Back End development is what makes someone a Full Stack Developer!
We will start Back End work by learning PHP and MySQL. We got a bit of an introduction to these languages with our morning Warm-ups this week. Josh turned us loose with some HackerRanks on PHP and MySQL. Both were challenging at first, but it seems that we have become pretty good Google’ers as we were able to pull up documentation and figure out methods to solve the problems fairly quickly!
Keyboard Shortcuts
After using VS Code daily for several weeks, I decided that today it was time to learn some useful shortcuts for the software. I listed below some of the useful shortcuts that I found:
- ⌥ + click --> Add cursor
- ⌘ + C OR ⌘ + X (empty selection) --> Copy or Cut entire line
- ⌘ + L --> Select current line
- ⌘ + D --> Add to current selection
- ⌘ + ← OR → --> Move to beginning or end of line
- ⌘ + ⌥ + ← OR → --> Move to left or right editor
- ⌘ + ⌥ + S --> Save all
- shift + ⌥ + F --> Format document
- ⌘ + B --> Toggle sidebar visibility
Finally, a somewhat unusual shortcut that I found was for something called Zen Mode. Similar to Focus Mode in Microsoft Word, it minimizes distracting elements of the screen, allowing you to focus on the act of coding:
- ⌘ + K then press Z --> Zen Mode ( esc esc (twice) to exit)